Historic photograph installed on the site where it was taken
Proposal for Brighton Seafront Public Art Commission
Brighton, England

Our proposal took as a starting point the representation, myth and collective
memory of Brighton, England, as a Bank Holiday destination for displays of public
disorder by rival gangs of ‘Mods’ and ‘Rockers’.

We proposed to make a billboard-sized enlargement of a news photograph of Brighton’s
first May-Day ‘riots’ in 1964. This would have been installed on the Aquarium
Terrace, the scene of the actual riots.

Brighton Seafront is connected to the history of military conflict along the
coastline and beaches of southern England. The 1960s generation of British youth
was the first not to undergo National Service after the Second World War, while
also benefiting from the economic prosperity of the postwar period The Mods’
and Rockers’ rebellious behaviour and conspicuous consumption carried enough
symbolic effect for them to be initially represented and dealt with as a significant
threat to the established order.

Decades of cultural reference and quotation are now interposed between the present
and that original time. By re-presenting this iconic photograph, Avant-Garde
would have interrogated the use of photography to structure imaginative access
to the past.

Avant-Garde considered how male violence becomes variously suppressed by the
State, presented as spectacle in popular culture, or valorised and incorporated
into official history. Yet the photograph tells little of the complexities of
class and gender in an important, albeit hedonistic struggle against the restrictions
of society. As an official commission which aestheticised youthful rebellion,
this project would have been an example of recuperation, the process by which
the social order is maintained.

‘Avant-garde’ derives from a French military term, which was later used in revolutionary
politics. Under Modernism it became a term of critical approval for experimental
arts. As the term became widely used to describe anything fashionable or novel,
it finally reached exhaustion and fell out of contemporary use.